Friday, January 29, 2016

When The Mother Wolf Died, Someone Unlikely Stepped Up To Help These Cubs

YouTube/Nordens Ark

By Caitlin Jill Anders

Jan. 29, 2016

Staff at Nordens Ark,
a zoo in Sweden, suddenly found themselves caring for two maned wolf
cubs when their mother tragically passed away from tumors just six days
after they were born.
Because their mother had taken such good
care of them the first few days, the staff decided to try bottle feeding
the cubs, and the results were successful (and adorable).

As the cubs continued to be bottle fed they grew bigger, stronger ...

And of course, more playful.

Sadly,
they were still without a role model or someone to care for them, but
there was one person that staff thought maybe be able to help ... their
father.

"Maned wolves are solitary and live alone even though the
male and female share the same living area, so the female takes sole
care of the cubs," a staff member at Nordens Ark told The Dodo. "Our
male has been very involved from the beginning and has stayed outside
the den to guard the cubs."
Since the dad of the pups seemed
unusually invested in them, the staff decided to try introducing him to
the cubs ... with the sweetest results.

Despite
his normal role, the wolf knew that his cubs needed him, and so he
stepped up to care for them when no one else could. The sweet cubs may
have lost a mother, but they still have a family.
Check out the full video of the cubs being bottle fed below:

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone